Who, by low creatures, leads to heights of love.
She had written that poem one day years ago in Wimpole Street when she was very unhappy. Now she was happy. She was growing old now and so was Flush. She bent down over him for a moment. Her face with its wide mouth and its great eyes and its heavy curls was still oddly like his. Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, each, perhaps, completed what was dormant in the other. But she was woman; he was dog. Mrs Browning went on reading. Then she looked at Flush again. But he did not look at her. An extraordinary change had come over him. ‘Flush!’ she cried. But he was silent. He had been alive; he was now dead. That was all. The drawing-room table, strangely enough, stood perfectly still.
Authorities
It must be admitted that there are very few authorities for the foregoing biography. But the reader who would like to check the facts or to pursue the subject further is referred to:
To Flush, My Dog.
Flush, or Faunus. } Poems by Elizabeth Barrett
Browning.
The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 2 vols.
The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited by Frederick Kenyon. 2 vols.
The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning addressed to Richard Hengist Horne, edited by S. R. Townshend Mayer. 2 vols.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: letters to her sister 1846–1859, edited by Leonard Huxley, LL.D.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her Letters, by Percy Lubbock.
References to Flush are to be found in the Letters of Mary Russell Mitford, edited by H. Chorley. 2 vols.
For an account of London Rookeries, The Rookeries of London, by Thomas Beames, 1850, may be consulted.
Notes
‘painted fabric’. Miss Barrett says, ‘I had a transparent blind put up in my open window’. She adds, ‘papa insults me with the analogy of a back window in a confectioner’s shop, but is obviously moved when the sunshine lights up the castle, notwithstanding’. Some hold that the castle, etc., was painted on a thin metallic substance; others that it was a muslin blind richly embroidered. There seems no certain way of settling the matter.
‘Mr Kenyon mumbled slightly because he had lost two front teeth.’ There are elements of exaggeration and conjecture here. Miss Mitford is the authority. She is reported to have said in conversation with Mr Horne, ‘Our dear friend, you are aware, never sees anybody but the members of her own family, and one or two others. She has a high opinion of the skill in reading as well as the fine taste, of Mr —, and she gets him to read her new poems aloud to her … So Mr — stands upon the hearth-rug, and uplifts the MS, and his voice, while our dear friend lies folded up in Indian shawls upon her sofa, with her long black tresses streaming over her bent-down head, all attention. Now, dear Mr — has lost a front tooth – not quite a front one, but a side front one – and this, you see, causes a defective utterance … an amiable indistinctness, a vague softening of syllables into each other, so that silence and ilence would really sound very like one another …’ There can be little doubt that Mr — was Mr Kenyon; the blank was necessitated by the peculiar delicacy of the Victorians with regard to teeth. But more important questions affecting English literature are involved. Miss Barrett has long been accused of a defective ear. Miss Mitford maintains that Mr Kenyon should rather be accused of defective teeth. On the other hand, Miss Barrett herself maintained that her rhymes had nothing to do with his lack of teeth or with her lack of ear. ‘A great deal of attention’, she wrote, ‘– far more than it would have taken to rhyme with complete accuracy – have I given to the subject of rhymes and have determined in cold blood to hazard some experiments.’ Hence she rhymed ‘angels’ with ‘candles’, ‘heaven’ with ‘unbelieving’, and ‘islands’ with ‘silence’ – in cold blood. It is of course for the professors to decide; but anybody who has studied Mrs Browning’s character and her actions will be inclined to take the view that she was a wilful breaker of rules whether of art or of love, and so to convict her of some complicity in the development of modern poetry.
‘yellow gloves’. It is recorded in Mrs Orr’s Life of Browning that he wore lemon-coloured gloves. Mrs Bridell-Fox, meeting him in 1835–6, says, ‘he was then slim and dark, and very handsome, and – may I hint it – just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things’.
‘He was stolen.’ As a matter of fact, Flush was stolen three times; but the unities seem to require that the three stealings shall be compressed into one. The total sum paid by Miss Barrett to the dog-stealers was £20.
‘The faces of those men were to come back to her on a sunny balcony in Italy.’ Readers of Aurora Leigh – but since such persons are non-existent it must be explained that Mrs Browning wrote a poem of this name, one of the most vivid passages in which (though it suffers from distortion natural to an artist who sees the object once only from a four-wheeler, with Wilson tugging at her skirts) is the description of a London slum. Clearly Mrs Browning possessed a fund of curiosity as to human life which was by no means satisfied by the busts of Homer and Chaucer on the washing-stand in the bedroom.
‘Lily Wilson fell in love with Signor Righi, the guardsman.’ The life of Lily Wilson is extremely obscure and thus cries aloud for the services of a biographer. No human figure in the Browning letters, save the principals, more excites our curiosity and baffles it. Her Christian name was Lily, her surname Wilson. That is all we know of her birth and upbringing. Whether she was the daughter of a farmer in the neighbourhood of Hope End, and became favourably known to the Barrett cook by the decency of her demeanour and the cleanliness of her apron, so much so that when she came up to the great house on some errand, Mrs Barrett made an excuse to come into the room just then and thought so well of her that she appointed her to be Miss Elizabeth’s maid; or whether she was a Cockney; or whether she was from Scotland – it is impossible to say. At any rate she was in service with Miss Barrett in the year 1846. She was ‘an expensive servant’ – her wages were £16 a year. Since she spoke almost as seldom as Flush, the outlines of her character are little known; and since Miss Barrett never wrote a poem about her, her appearance is far less familiar than his. Yet it is clear from indications in the letters that she was in the beginning one of those demure, almost inhumanly correct British maids who were at that time the glory of the British basement. It is obvious that Wilson was a stickler for rights and ceremonies. Wilson undoubtedly revered ‘the room’; Wilson would have been the first to insist that under servants must eat their pudding in one place, upper servants in another. All this is implicit in the remark she made when she beat Flush with her hand ‘because it is right’. Such respect for convention, it need hardly be said, breeds extreme horror of any breach of it; so that when Wilson was confronted with the lower orders in Manning Street she was far more alarmed, and far more certain that the dog-stealers were murderers, than Miss Barrett was. At the same time the heroic way in which she overcame her terror and went with Miss Barrett in the cab shows how deeply the other convention of loyalty to her mistress was ingrained in her. Where Miss Barrett went, Wilson must go too. This principle was triumphantly demonstrated by her conduct at the time of the elopement. Miss Barrett had been doubtful of Wilson’s courage; but her doubts were unfounded. ‘Wilson’, she wrote – and these were the last words she ever wrote to Mr Browning as Miss Barrett – ‘has been perfect to me. And I … calling her “timid” and afraid of her timidity! I begin to think that none are so bold as the timid, when they are fairly roused.’ It is worth, parenthetically, dwelling for a second on the extreme precariousness of a servant’s life. If Wilson had not gone with Miss Barrett, she would have been, as Miss Barrett knew, ‘turned into the street before sunset’, with only a few shillings, presumably, saved from her sixteen pounds a year. And what then would have been her fate? Since English fiction in the ’forties scarcely deals with the lives of ladies’ maids, and biography had not then cast its searchlight so low, the question must rema
in a question. But Wilson took the plunge. She declared that she would ‘go anywhere in the world with me’. She left the basement, the room, the whole of that world of Wimpole Street, which to Wilson meant all civilisation, all right thinking and decent living, for the wild debauchery and irreligion of a foreign land. Nothing is more curious than to observe the conflict that took place in Italy between Wilson’s English gentility and her natural passions. She derided the Italian Court; she was shocked by Italian pictures. But, though ‘she was struck back by the indecency of the Venus’, Wilson, greatly to her credit, seems to have bethought her that women are naked when they take their clothes off. Even I myself, she may have thought, am naked for two or three seconds daily. And so ‘She thinks she shall try again, and the troublesome modesty may subside, who knows?’ That it did subside rapidly is plain. Soon she not merely approved of Italy; she had fallen in love with Signor Righi of the Grand Ducal bodyguard – ‘all highly respectable and moral men, and some six feet high’ – was wearing an engagement ring; was dismissing a London suitor; and was learning to speak Italian. Then the clouds descend again; when they lift they show us Wilson deserted – ‘the faithless Righi had backed out of his engagement to Wilson’. Suspicion attaches to his brother, a wholesale haberdasher at Prato. When Righi resigned from the Ducal bodyguard, he became, on his brother’s advice, a retail haberdasher at Prato. Whether his position required a knowledge of haberdashery in his wife, whether one of the girls of Prato could supply it, it is certain that he did not write to Wilson as often as he should have done. But what conduct it was on the part of this highly respectable and moral man that led Mrs Browning to exclaim in 1850, ‘[Wilson] is over it completely, which does the greatest credit to her good sense and rectitude of character. How could she continue to love such a man?’ – why Righi had shrunk to ‘such a man’ in so short a time, it is impossible to say. Deserted by Righi, Wilson became more and more attached to the Browning family. She discharged not only the duties of a lady’s maid, but cooked knead cakes, made dresses, and became a devoted nurse to Penini, the baby; so that in time the baby himself exalted her to the rank of the family, where she justly belonged, and refused to call her anything but Lily. In 1855 Wilson married Romagnoli, the Brownings’ manservant, ‘a good tender-hearted man’; and for some time the two kept house for the Brownings. But in 1859 Robert Browning ‘accepted office as Landor’s guardian’, an office of great delicacy and responsibility, for Landor’s habits were difficult; ‘of restraint he has not a grain’, Mrs Browning wrote, ‘and of suspiciousness many grains’. In these circumstances Wilson was appointed ‘his duenna’ with a salary of twenty-two pounds a year ‘besides what is left of his rations’. Later her wages were increased to thirty pounds, for to act as duenna to ‘an old lion’ who has ‘the impulses of a tiger’, throws his plate out of the window or dashes it on the ground if he dislikes his dinner, and suspects servants of opening desks, entailed, as Mrs Browning observed, ‘certain risks, and I for one would rather not meet them’. But to Wilson, who had known Mr Barrett and the spirits, a few plates more or less flying out of the window or dashed upon the floor was a matter of little consequence – such risks were all in the day’s work.
That day, so far as it is still visible to us, was certainly a strange one. Whether it began or not in some remote English village, it ended in Venice in the Palazzo Rezzonico. There at least she was still living in the year 1897, a widow, in the house of the little boy whom she had nursed and loved – Mr Barrett Browning. A very strange day it had been, she may have thought, as she sat in the red Venetian sunset, an old woman, dreaming. Her friends, married to farm hands, still stumbled up the English lanes to fetch a pint of beer. And she had eloped with Miss Barrett to Italy; she had seen all kinds of queer things – revolutions, guardsmen, spirits; Mr Landor throwing his plate out of the window. Then Mrs Browning had died – there can have been no lack of thoughts in Wilson’s old head as she sat at the window of the Palazzo Rezzonico in the evening. But nothing can be more vain than to pretend that we can guess what they were, for she was typical of the great army of her kind – the inscrutable, the all-but-silent, the all-but-invisible servant maids of history. ‘A more honest, true and affectionate heart than Wilson’s cannot be found’ – her mistress’s words may serve her for epitaph.
‘he was scourged by fleas’. It appears that Italy was famous for its fleas in the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, they served to break down conventions that were otherwise insurmountable. For example, when Nathaniel Hawthorne went to tea with Miss Bremer in Rome (1858), ‘we spoke of fleas – insects that, in Rome, come home to everybody’s business and bosom, and are so common and inevitable, that no delicacy is felt about alluding to the sufferings they inflict. Poor little Miss Bremer was tormented with one while turning out our tea …’
‘Nero had leapt from a top storey window.’ Nero (c. 1849–60) was, according to Carlyle, ‘A little Cuban (Maltese? and otherwise mongrel) shock, mostly white – a most affectionate, lively little dog, otherwise of small merit, and little or no training’. Material for a life of him abounds, but this is not the occasion to make use of it. It is enough to say that he was stolen; that he brought Carlyle a cheque to buy a horse with tied round his neck; that ‘twice or thrice I flung him into the sea [at Aberdour], which he didn’t at all like’; that in 1850 he sprang from the library window, and, clearing the area spikes, fell ‘plash’ on to the pavement. ‘It was after breakfast,’ Mrs Carlyle says, ‘and he had been standing at the open window, watching the birds … Lying in my bed, I heard thro’ the deal partition Elizabeth scream: Oh God! oh Nero! and rush downstairs like a strong wind out at the street door … then I sprang to meet her in my night-shift … Mr C. came down from his bedroom with his chin all over soap and asked, “Has anything happened to Nero?” – “Oh, sir, he must have broken all his legs, he leapt out at your window!” – “God bless me!” said Mr C. and returned to finish his shaving.’ No bones were broken, however, and he survived, to be run over by a butcher’s cart, and to die at last from the effects of the accident on 1st February 1860. He is buried at the top of the garden at Cheyne Row under a small stone tablet.
Whether he wished to kill himself, or whether, as Mrs Carlyle insinuates, he was merely jumping after birds, might be the occasion for an extremely interesting treatise on canine psychology. Some hold that Byron’s dog went mad in sympathy with Byron; others that Nero was driven to desperate melancholy by associating with Mr Carlyle. The whole question of dogs’ relation to the spirit of the age, whether it is possible to call one dog Elizabethan, another Augustan, another Victorian, together with the influence upon dogs of the poetry and philosophy of their masters, deserves a fuller discussion than can here be given it. For the present, Nero’s motives must remain obscure.
‘Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton believed himself invisible.’ Mrs Huth Jackson in A Victorian Childhood says: ‘Lord Arthur Russell told me, many years later, that when a small boy he was taken to Knebworth by his mother. Next morning he was in the big hall having breakfast when a strange-looking old gentleman in a shabby dressing-gown came in and walked slowly round the table staring at each of the guests in turn. He heard his mother’s neighbour whisper to her, “Do not take any notice, he thinks he is invisible”. It was Lord Lytton himself’ (pp. 17–18).
‘he was now dead’. It is certain that Flush died; but the date and manner of his death are unknown. The only reference consists in the statement that ‘Flush lived to a good old age and is buried in the vaults of Casa Guidi’. Mrs Browning was buried in the English Cemetery at Florence, Robert Browning in Westminster Abbey. Flush still lies, therefore, beneath the house in which, once upon a time, the Brownings lived.
THE END
BOCCACCIO · Mrs Rosie and the Priest
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS · As kingfishers catch fire
The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue
THOMAS DE QUINCEY · On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE · Aphorisms on Love and Hate
JOHN RUSKIN · Traffic
PU SONGLING · Wailing Ghosts
JONATHAN SWIFT · A Modest Proposal
Three Tang Dynasty Poets
WALT WHITMAN · On the Beach at Night Alone
KENKŌ · A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees
BALTASAR GRACIÁN · How to Use Your Enemies
JOHN KEATS · The Eve of St Agnes
THOMAS HARDY · Woman much missed
GUY DE MAUPASSANT · Femme Fatale
MARCO POLO · Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls
SUETONIUS · Caligula
APOLLONIUS OF RHODES · Jason and Medea
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON · Olalla
KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS · The Communist Manifesto
PETRONIUS · Trimalchio’s Feast
JOHANN PETER HEBEL · How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher’s Dog
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN · The Tinder Box
RUDYARD KIPLING · The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
DANTE · Circles of Hell
HENRY MAYHEW · Of Street Piemen
HAFEZ · The nightingales are drunk
GEOFFREY CHAUCER · The Wife of Bath
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE · How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing
THOMAS NASHE · The Terrors of the Night
EDGAR ALLAN POE · The Tell-Tale Heart
MARY KINGSLEY · A Hippo Banquet
JANE AUSTEN · The Beautifull Cassandra
ANTON CHEKHOV · Gooseberries
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE · Well, they are gone, and here must I remain
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE · Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings
CHARLES DICKENS · The Great Winglebury Duel
HERMAN MELVILLE · The Maldive Shark
ELIZABETH GASKELL · The Old Nurse’s Story
Flush Page 10
